M.D. of Pincher Creek deals with water shortfalls in Oldman River Reservoir

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek has been faced with a water crisis since last summer, and has been under Stage 3 water restrictions for the past eight months.

“I guess it all kind of started about mid-August 2023, when our intakes, which are typically underwater at the Oldman Reservoir, reached the surface,” said David Desabrais, the utilities and infrastructure manager for the M.D. of Pincher Creek. “Conditions got so dry that the reservoir dropped to a level that it hasn’t in 20 years.”

Since then, the M.D. has been having to truck in raw and potable water to its water treatment plant to serve the hamlets of Lundbreck and Beaver Mines, the village of Cowley, Castle Mountain Resort and Castle Provincial Park, along with rural homes in the area.

However, in December 2023, the M.D. was approved to get a temporary pumping station set up in the reservoir.

“The Crowsnest River is essentially flowing by where our existing intakes are, and because they’re above water we don’t have the ability to use them without doing some pretty intensive construction work, which is not really feasible, so we have this set up that we run daily,” Desabrais said.

Desabrais says this system helps them with their hauling costs, but isn’t a sustainable operation past winter.

“Our budget for water services for a year is around a million dollars. This year, we just finalized figuring out what the costs for this situation that we’re in, and it cost us around an additional million dollars just for those roughly six months of 2023,” he said.

However, there’s potential monetary relief on the way. In Alberta’s 2024 budget released last week, the province indicated that if passed, a total of $125 million would be invested over the next five years for the province’s new Drought and Flood Protection Program.

The new initiative is designed to help vulnerable municipalities and Indigenous communities across the province develop long-term infrastructure — something the M.D. has already been seeking out.

“We’ve kind of scoped out various solutions but we’ve zeroed in on a project that’s near our existing intakes,” Desabrais said, “which would essentially be building a couple redundant infiltration structures that are below the surface level, so below ground, near the Crowsnest River, near our existing intake.”

“They would essentially be hydraulically connected, so even during times of drought, the aquifer around the Crowsnest River would still feed outwards. Our goal is to tap into that aquifer and to be able to supply our residents when we see extreme periods of drought like this.”

While the M.D. is in the process of finalizing various approvals through the provincial and federal governments, it’s in a rush to get the project completed before summer rolls in and the water levels change.

“If we don’t get approval from this project with the government, we’ll be really banking on the reservoir levels rising again this year,” Desabrais said. “We think there’s a good chance that it might surpass our intake this year, at least temporarily, but based on the snowpack, if this continues there’s a good chance that even if it does surpass our intake level, it’s going to drop again sometime later this summer or fall.

“Then we would be forced to haul water until we get another solution in place or until the water levels rise again in 2025. So, it’s pretty serious if we can’t get a project in place.”

1:22 Alberta promises $125 million to fight drought and flood conditions

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